Flowers for Algernon

Flowers for Algernon

The first entry reads: "progris riport 1 martch 3."

Three words and a date. Misspelled, cramped, painfully earnest. That is how Charlie Gordon introduces himself to the world -- a 32-year-old man with an IQ of 68, a custodian at Donner's Bakery in New York City, and a hunger to learn that he cannot quite name. He does not know why he wants so badly to read. He does not know why his teacher, Miss Alice Kinnian, looks at him sometimes with something that might be sadness. He does not know that the doctors who have selected him for an experimental brain surgery are about to change everything he is, everything he was, and everything he will become.

Daniel Keyes published the novel version of *Flowers for Algernon* in 1966, seven years after the original novella appeared in *The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction* and won the Hugo Award for Best Short Fiction. The novella took five years to sell -- rejected repeatedly, including by Doubleday, who wanted Keyes to change the ending so Charlie kept his intelligence. Keyes gave back the advance rather than change it. He was right. The expanded novel, finally published by Harcourt, tied for the Nebula Award for Best Novel with Samuel Delany's *Babel-17*. Over the decades it has been read by millions, taught in schools across the world, challenged, banned, and returned to the shelf -- not because of its science fiction premise, but because of the brutally honest question it refuses to stop asking: What does it mean to be a person? What do we owe each other? And when we take a human being and make them "better" by one narrow measurement, what exactly are we doing to them?